My teacher made the following joke when explaining relative sentences:
食べたレストラン can be “The restaurant which I ate dinner in” or, in the case the speaker is someone like Gozilla, “The restaurant I ate”.
This is one of the reasons I like japanese so much.
Have you ever heard the word “ironing board” and imagined a plank of wood doing laundry? Or heard “driving school” and imagined a building inside a car? Or heard “baking sheet” and imagined a piece of paper kneading dough?
This ambiguity technically exists, but you’ve gotten used to it in English, and you will in Japanese as well.
Are you telling me a restaurant ate this sandwich?
case in point that out of context sentences are not translatable, this will not be the last time
Isn’t is because it’s omitting the subject? In English, you don’t omit the subject, you would always say, the restaurant where “I” ate sandwich. But in Japanese, you can omit it. But it still means the restaurant where I or you or whatever, depend on the context, and assume you understand the context without saying.
I mean these sentences are kind of like if you were to ask:
‘I want the blue one.’
How am I supposed to know what the blue one is?
The answer is: through context that you have not provided.
7 comments
出す isn’t passive, so it’s “which serves sushi.”
For the second one, which makes more sense?
My teacher made the following joke when explaining relative sentences:
食べたレストラン can be “The restaurant which I ate dinner in” or, in the case the speaker is someone like Gozilla, “The restaurant I ate”.
This is one of the reasons I like japanese so much.
Have you ever heard the word “ironing board” and imagined a plank of wood doing laundry? Or heard “driving school” and imagined a building inside a car? Or heard “baking sheet” and imagined a piece of paper kneading dough?
This ambiguity technically exists, but you’ve gotten used to it in English, and you will in Japanese as well.
Are you telling me a restaurant ate this sandwich?
case in point that out of context sentences are not translatable, this will not be the last time
Isn’t is because it’s omitting the subject? In English, you don’t omit the subject, you would always say, the restaurant where “I” ate sandwich. But in Japanese, you can omit it. But it still means the restaurant where I or you or whatever, depend on the context, and assume you understand the context without saying.
I mean these sentences are kind of like if you were to ask:
‘I want the blue one.’
How am I supposed to know what the blue one is?
The answer is: through context that you have not provided.